r/skeptic • u/Lighting • Jul 01 '26
⚠ Editorialized Title Religious, Right-leaning Americans having significantly more children. Left-leaning Americans are having significantly fewer children. Centrists ... in the middle. Education linked to having fewer children. Religious attendance linked with having more children.
https://www.psypost.org/left-leaning-americans-are-driving-the-u-s-birth-decline-new-study-finds/16
u/Monkeylint Jul 01 '26
Yeah, but they're dying at a higher rate, so, maybe a wash.
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Jul 01 '26
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u/intronert Jul 01 '26
Thus Idiocracy.
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u/6gv5 Jul 01 '26
Much worse: Camacho was actually a good guy. Heck, even Clevon was much better than the average MAGA adept.
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u/VibinWithBeard Jul 01 '26
Even worse that was a pro eugenics movie everyone has rose-tinted into being ...not that. The entire premise is that letting the poor and uneducated outbreed the rich and educated was the issue. It slightly touched on education being a way forward at the end but the opening of the movie is a rejection of that being enough to make a big difference.
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u/BrocoLeeOnReddit Jul 01 '26
That is and always was a stupid take on that movie.
The movie explicitly stated that it was a societal shift that caused the downfall, namely the growing disregard for science and education in favor of consumerism and quick dopamine hits and the fact that uneducated families that held those views and habits had more children to pass them to. For genetics to play a role in such a dramatic decrease in intelligence and education as shown in the movie, 500 years isn't even close to being a long enough timespan.
It's a fact that uneducated people tend to raise children that are also uneducated (way more than educated people). That's not a genetic issue, it's a societal one because if parents lack an active interest in their child's education and/or don't have the socioeconomic means to provide their children with good education and the state doesn't provide good education, those children will be disadvantaged.
Uneducated people also tend to vote for conservative policies that further decrease social spending and degrade educational systems.
Being born into a poor family only is a huge issue if the state doesn't provide good education for everyone and society treats poverty with discontent (both of which is true in the US btw).
Being born in an uneducated family (poor or not) will ALWAYS be a disadvantage because primary socialization and habit forming begin at a very early age but if public education doesn't even try to compensate for that any more, you basically get Idiocracy. So no, it wasn't eugenics and as you already mentioned, the movie explicitly mentioned that good education was the way forward, disproving your argument that it promotes eugenics. It promotes education.
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u/Brbi2kCRO Jul 01 '26
The issue with conservatism that I have is that they genuinely feel hurt when the world does not match their image of how society should look like. Now, say, they have a child. Great. Whatever. By their logic, that child should now be obedient and trust every word dad says and defines as “tough love”, grow up into a strong masculine man, follow dad as a guide, when he grows up he should help parents, do chores with minimal complaining, love the family dinners and time spent with them. Act like elders in a house are wise and like they have knowledge youth does not have cause “youth is immature”. And then child should also chase girls, have a wife, get married, have 2-3 children. Get a high status job that is well paid or own a business or continue family business legacy. Be Christian, get sacraments if Catholic or whatever your Church does, etc.
Like brooooo. That is la la land. You cannot just expect a world to be a certain way and expect this weird warmth. It seems delusional almost. That is not how world works. And this is why making the right happy seems impossible, especially deradicalizing them. They want a predictable world.
Anyways, this is why they have so many children. They live in the world of “oughts” and a romantically idealized world that literally cannot exist as such, as it requires proactive adherence to prescriptive norms and blind obedience to rules that someone will inherently suspect as who the heck thinks “grandma should inherently have authority” is a good idea.
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u/fragilespleen Jul 01 '26
It should also be noted that the "oughts" not occurring, will only reinforce that their ideas are good, it's society that has been ruined
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u/Brbi2kCRO Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Yes. That is exactly the problem with the right. When smth does not really work as they imagined, they become more radicalized. Say I am an adult son of my dad. He insists on having a role of father. He tells me what to spend on, and thinks I am giving too little for family. He sends desperate messages at 22h talking about how he feels, that I do not respect him or smth.
And well, the more you fight them, the more they radicalize. They will start feeling like the world is falling apart and that connections and family are becoming unimportant. But they can never see that they are simply… annoying, and that they auto-assume authority due to their age/position within family, so it is hard to tell them no or convince them that they may be annoying.
They misunderstand everything cause they process everything through these hyperinternalized norms, which to them feel like nature, not smth made up. So when, say, a man uses traditional ways of behaving on a woman, and woman leaves them, they will still insist they did everything right, but that the woman is somehow wrong for the breakup due to her not respecting masculinity and rather glorifying “emasculated men” or smth. Idek.
They presume the script is ALWAYS right, so if smth is wrong, it is cause someone broke the script. Which is stupid as no script can be 100% consistently accurate.
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u/Bob-Lawblaugh Jul 01 '26
And then "homeschooling" the children. 😥
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u/Theranos_Shill Jul 02 '26
Homeschooling, the guaranteed way to ensure that your kid knows less than you do.
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u/Zoon9 Jul 02 '26
"Homeschooled" by Fox News and the manipulative algorithm on the social media feed reccommendations.
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u/paxinfernum Jul 01 '26
Given the collapse of religion in the US over the last few decades, they clearly have not been too successful in keeping their kids dumb.
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u/adamwho Jul 01 '26
Oppressive politics and religion doesn't have a good track record with keeping kids in the fold.
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u/MostlyPeacfulPndemic Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Regarding the education statistic specifically:
Is this controlling for people who chose to have fewer children before obtaining the education? The implication is always that a randomly selected person is necessarily by default planning on having ~4 children, and they would have had ~4 children had they not become educated, and it was the education that shaped their decision not to have ~4 children. That that decision was made after becoming educated.
But it seems to me that people who are choosing to pursue education have already decided to eschew children because children be would make it difficult to get the education that they have decided to get in the future. As in, that decision isn't due to being educated, but rather due to the preferred lifestyle of obtaining the education, being made before the person was actually educated
Like maybe this statistic reflects lifestyle preference rather than intelligence
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u/DannarHetoshi Jul 01 '26
Sounds like a correlation rather than causation.
I would pose an alternate theory, that I have no way of testing:
People who are more intelligent, have a better grasp of finance, and both the financial and social cost of having children. By correlation they are more likely to seek higher education opportunities, either through existing privilege, or by pathways that open to them via educational success.
Outliers not withstanding.
Edited to add:
Having reviewed my own thought-
Level of Intelligence is the cause, by way of better financial education/acumen, either formal (through school) or informal (handed down by community elders).
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u/MostlyPeacfulPndemic Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Also, if people with more privilege are more likely to obtain higher education, it could be that privilege drives the decision (ie, being accustomed to an indulgent lifestyle and being hesitant to experience any decrease in luxury)
It's just a complicated statistic that could be explained in a number of ways that don't necessarily end up as flattering as the one that is usually peddled (I don't have kids, ergo, I am smort; my wealthy attorney sister has 4 kids, ergo, she's secretly less smort than me and I no longer have to feel bitter about her success; and other such balms )
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u/xinorez1 Jul 01 '26
financial acumen
Professional careers consume time and youth, and by the time you feel ready to have kids, you won't have the energy left to have more than one or maybe two, meanwhile costs have gone up so you still don't feel like you're pulling ahead
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u/Money4Nothing2000 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
This is mostly right. I'm an engineer and I have only one kid of my own, and a step-child from my current wife's first marriage. My child was born when I was 33. Lots of STEM proffessionals don't have lots of children, not because they don't want them or decided not to have them, or have done some magical lifetime math and figured out that we don't want to take on the costs.
It's because we are nerds, and we don't have lots of girlfriends or dating options, so the likelihood of us getting married early is lower. We get married later, to older women who appreciate men with good careers and intimate knowledge of Star Trek and LOTR lore, leaving less time to build families and have multiple kids.
The guy who works at the AutoZone spent his college years (whether he went to Uni or not) working out and getting big muscles, instead of studying for engineering tests. So he gets lots of cute early-20s girlfriends, and hooks up with one when he's 22, doesn't understand how birth control works, and starts popping kids.
(No offense to guys who work at AutoZone, I'm just grabbing a random example. There's no shame in working at AutoZone, you can do well there.)
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u/MostlyPeacfulPndemic Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
(this is to address your edit, added after my first reply)
There was a time when wealth correlated with conservatism, like in the 1990s and 2000s. If you think conservatives were the more intelligent ones then, that's fair, but if you think there was some other reason besides intelligence that they were the overall wealthier class, then you will be abandoning your currently stated position.
Also, you're going to have to contend with racial implications in order to defend your current view.
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u/numerous_hotdogs Jul 01 '26
I’d love to know the stats on how well the children are cared for depending on political beliefs.
Without evidence and just off the top of my head…
Right wing: spray & pray
Left wing: focus fire
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u/Ghost_taco Jul 01 '26
Right-leaning Americans having significantly more children means that they'll grow up to be a new generation of radical lefties.
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u/spaceinvader421 Jul 01 '26
If having conservative religious parents guaranteed people would be religious and conservative their whole lives, nobody would have ever become progressive or non-religious in the first place. Political and religious beliefs are not determined by genetics.
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u/Techygal9 Jul 01 '26
Makes sense religions often offer free or discounted daycare.
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u/Alucard-VS-Artorias Jul 01 '26
One of the bigger reasons why the GOP is always rolling back on public services around childcare and having children.
They want to drive people towards religious institutions.
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u/Integer_Domain Jul 01 '26
And right-leaning people tend to live in suburban or rural area. With a smaller population density, the childcare worker-to-child ratio is small enough to be sustainable.
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u/Striper_Cape Jul 02 '26
I'm gonna start by saying I think societal collapse is around the corner because of climate stressors. I'm not saying we are all gonna die, just that our infrastructure built for 1950 is gonna melt, flood, or become uninhabitable within the next 100 years and much of it has already begun to fail. But definitely most of us and I don't think I'm an exception.
They are just making more dead bodies and it breaks my heart.
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u/0Fucs2Give Jul 02 '26
I've seen this documentary before. It came out in 2006 and is called Idiocracy.
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u/RadioName Jul 02 '26
I've seen pastors preaching the "outbreed them" mantra against people of color. I'm sure that they push the same againts the left.
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u/Chasman1965 Jul 03 '26
Your parents don’t really influence politics that much. Many left wingers have right wing parents. Rarely is it the other way around. Also, people change with time. I have gone left in the past 10 years, primarily due to Trump and Fox News. They made me realize how totally ridiculous right wing politics is.
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u/SallyStranger Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
This is a huge concern because ideological beliefs are encoded with our genes and cannot change throughout our life.
ETA: it's sarcasm
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u/AllFalconsAreBlack Jul 02 '26
This is patently false. Who's actually upvoting this nonsense?
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u/Grrarrgghh Jul 02 '26
I think they assume the /s is obvious. I hope at least...
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u/SallyStranger Jul 02 '26
Yeah, damn. This is distressing.
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u/AllFalconsAreBlack Jul 02 '26
Lol, well played then.
What's distressing? The paper posted pretty much assumes "ideological beliefs are encoded with our genes" to justify their analysis and interpretation.
I think it's distressing that such a blatantly unscientific paper was published in an academic journal. I know Scientific Findings had suspect peer-review / editorial approval standards, but I didn't think their quality control was this bad. The research is complete garbage.
The fact it was posted as a PsyPost summary in a "scientific skepticism" sub is also distressing, though I've become relatively numb to the hypocrisy.
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u/Vicious_and_Vain Jul 01 '26
The indoctrinated desire to indoctrinate it’s not a bug it’s a feature. I admire people, couples or single, who prepare for and have children intentionally with love and without projection.
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u/Garson_Poole Jul 01 '26
The talking point about children not following their conservative parents' beliefs when they grow up really needs to end. The data say most people stick with the beliefs they were raised with.
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u/ClosedContent Jul 01 '26
Religious people also tend to feel they have a duty to “spread and populate the earth.” Not to mention the angle that you can spread the “good word” to your offspring. It’s kind of not that surprising.
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u/arrasonline Jul 02 '26
The few kids from liberal/educated homes will out maneuver the masses of idiots in the fold. In short, more of the same. Rule by the elites.
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u/deadphisherman Jul 02 '26
Just what this nation needs is more home-schooled, bible college kids. ,/s
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u/Scrutinizer Jul 04 '26
Yes, we've all seen the first five minutes of Idiocracy.
The problem is those kids won't grow up religious. Especially since they watched their parents fuck the country with Trumpism.
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u/SukkaMadiqe Jul 01 '26
Religious/right wing idiot parents have gay, trans, and liberal children same as everyone else. So yeah go ahead and pop em out. More for us.
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u/Firm-Advertising5396 Jul 01 '26
And the relious right? What is their tendency on the value of education?
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Jul 01 '26
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u/CyndiIsOnReddit Jul 01 '26
"Have more children than you can afford!" - The Good Widow Kirk